Child Killer Pleads Guilty : Crime: An ex-day-care aide admits kidnaping and strangling an 8-year-old boy. A jury will consider the death penalty.

On the eve of his murder trial in Ventura County Superior Court, Gregory Scott Smith pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges that he kidnaped, molested and strangled an 8-year-old boy, then set fire to his body nearly 19 months ago near Simi Valley.

Attorneys are expected to choose a jury next week to decide whether Smith, a 23-year-old former Canoga Park day-care aide, should be executed for murdering Paul Bailly of Northridge.

On March 23, 1990, firefighters answering a call to a brush fire found Paul’s body amid burning grass, just a few hours after his mother had dropped him off at a latchkey program in Northridge. Smith had been fired from his job at the program on March 6, 1990, after complaints about his conduct from several children, including Paul.

Prosecutors had planned to show at the trial that Smith was sexually attracted to Paul, and that he plotted revenge on the boy for making complaints that helped Smith get fired from the program at Darby Avenue Elementary School.

Smith initially pleaded not guilty to the charges. But then came the plea change, moments after attorneys finished a week’s worth of arguments over what evidence would be allowed at trial--the last piece of which was a school portrait of Paul, smiling.

Judge Steven Z. Perren admitted Paul’s portrait for the trial over the objections of Smith’s attorneys. Then he asked if there was any other business before proceeding to jury selection Wednesday morning.

Defense attorney Willard Wiksell stood and calmly made a motion to change Smith’s plea to guilty of all charges--kidnaping, child molestation, forcible sodomy, murder and arson.

Perren rolled his eyes in apparent shock, and Smith, gaunt and pale from nearly 19 months in jail, collapsed in tears and buried his face in his hands.

Smith’s parents cried too, as they sat behind him in the courtroom.

Perren then adjourned at midday and allowed defense attorneys Wiksell and James M. Farley time after the lunch break to review guilty plea documents with Smith in a courtroom holding cell.

When they emerged, Perren took Smith carefully, if haltingly, through the plea.

Several times Smith stopped the judge and asked questions about the crimes that he was admitting.

At one point, Smith said, “You lost me,” but later admitted his guilt to all five felonies, plus special circumstances that allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty.

Farley and Wiksell said in earlier interviews that Smith’s psychological profile is their main hope of keeping him out of the gas chamber.

The attorneys said a brain disorder kept Smith from talking until age 6 and left him too mentally handicapped and immature to have intentionally killed Paul.

And they conceded that the prosecution’s evidence was strong, including testimony by a Ventura County Jail inmate who said Smith confessed to him.

The plea eliminates the need for a trial and sends Smith’s case directly to the penalty phase.

Whether the sudden guilty plea was a strategic move, it will give Smith, as an admitted child murderer, several advantages when he faces a jury that must decide whether he should live or die.

It discourages prosecutors from presenting the entire murder case and all the grisly evidence to the jury, and keeps the jury from having to sit through a trial that probably would have lasted into January.

Although prosecutors can present evidence ranging from the blue gag found in Paul’s mouth to photos of his burned body, they are more likely to focus on the most crucial pieces of evidence rather than showing all of it to the jurors.

The defense attorneys and Deputy Dist. Attys. Peter D. Kossoris and Gregory D. Totten declined to comment on the case publicly Wednesday.

But the prosecutors have said that witnesses were prepared to back up their theory that Smith kidnaped Paul from outside Darby Avenue Elementary School and took the boy to his home in Canoga Park.

They said forensic evidence showed that Smith handcuffed the boy, stuffed a blue rag into his mouth and sealed it with four layers of duct tape wrapped around his head, then sodomized him.

And they said evidence showed that Smith choked Paul, who threw up into his gag and suffocated in his vomit.

Then, prosecutors said, the evidence would show that Smith took Paul’s body to the field east of Black Canyon Road near the Santa Susana Knolls and set it afire with gasoline from a can that witnesses spotted in his room the night before.

Prosecutors plan to ask the jury to condemn Smith to the gas chamber, but the jury could instead recommend that the judge sentence him to life in prison without possibility of parole for the first-degree murder charge. Perren told Smith that he faces an additional 16 2/3 years for pleading guilty to the other felony charges.